Design For User-Friendliness, Heavy Web Traffic, ADA Compliance, and More
Your website is your online headquarters. What users find there will make an impression, for better or worse.
Much like the design of a physical headquarters, your online presence should represent your business in the best light possible.
To achieve this goal, you need a tool that can make your business stand out online.
May we recommend WordPress?
A WordPress-based website offers six essential benefits that position your business for excellent visibility, traffic, and conversions:
- Control over the website’s code
- Customization
- SEO-friendliness
- Open-source innovation and security
- Support for ADA compliance
- User-friendliness
Control Your Website Code With WordPress
Not all site-building platforms allow you to control your website code. Not controlling your code might make sense if you don’t plan to optimize your website for search engines, you aren’t necessarily worried about security, or you don’t see your website scaling or requiring updates in the future. Think about a website you’ve visited recently, where you took one look and said, “Nope.” Those sites likely don’t control their code.
A smart organization should always want control over its website, much like any other highly visible aspect of the brand. Otherwise, you’re beholden to your platform’s idea of how your website should look and function.
Even if you plan on hiring a professional WordPress web developer and purchase ongoing maintenance and updates, owning your website’s code provides these benefits:
- Quickly scaling your sitemap and content by making adjustments and adding features to your existing code.
- Avoiding security issues by controlling your code, instead of relying on potentially vulnerable code written by an anonymous developer.
- Structuring your website for search engine optimization (SEO) by coding with best practices in mind.
- Streamlining and optimizing your website’s performance without having to depend on clunky or redundant code from a third-party developer.
Endless Customizations Help Your WordPress Website Stand Out
Developers and designers want to work with WordPress. This platform offers a robust ecosystem of themes, customizations, plugins, and more, allowing them to develop a design that stands out among your competitors.
Browse the websites in your industry for less than five minutes, and you can easily identify which sites were built with a platform like WordPress and which ones opted for boilerplate, unimaginative templates and features or inconvenient hard-coding.
For those considering help with their website design and development in Overland Park, ask your marketing partner how they leverage WordPress to give their clients’ websites a unique voice and character.
WordPress Website Development Helps Bring User Traffic to You
WordPress understands the value of SEO for your business. Without SEO, your users can’t search for keywords in your industry and find your website in the search engine results pages.
WordPress website design creates an SEO-friendly destination that search engines want to recommend to users.
- WordPress code structure makes it easy for search engines to “crawl” your website, which is how they understand your content’s value to searchers.
- If you plan to include keyword-rich blogs, WordPress blog features, one of their first-ever offerings, are highly effective for this tactic.
- Quickly integrate the programs you use to track SEO performance into your WordPress website.
- WordPress loads quickly for users, and search engines like to recommend sites that deliver what users want, when they want it.
- Designers are able to include features like image alt-text and permalinks that use relevant keywords to further optimize the site and align with what users are searching for.
Still unsure of what SEO means? Start here.
An Open-Source Approach Keeps WordPress Thriving
Open-source software allows users to continually improve and update its features. WordPress is an open-source platform that is maintained by expert programmers who want to see it succeed for the benefit of businesses like yours.
Programmers like to give back to WordPress in particular because it is such a vital product for website developers. Because programmers are actively improving, debugging, and contributing new features to WordPress, businesses get a better, more secure product for their website.
ADA Compliant Web Design Is a Must (It’s Also Federal Law)
By law, your website must be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. ADA-compliant web design provides a user experience that is accessible to all.
An ADA compliant website is:
- Easily interpretable using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader that reads text aloud.
- Perceivable by using just one of your senses, such as images with alt-text that can be read aloud.
- Readable for a variety of vision types by taking font size and color schemes into consideration.
- Functional through the use of keyboard controls and shortcuts.
As we’ve mentioned, WordPress provides opportunities to improve the user experience for ADA compliance. Because of WordPress’ vast ecosystem of plugins, businesses can also find tools that assess compliance, including a proprietary solution called Compliance Check.
WordPress Web Development Is User Friendly For Business Owners
WordPress makes the development and design process easy to manage, which is particularly important when a business takes over their site after a website design agency has launched it.
Although a marketing agency that specializes in WordPress web design can offer the training and support you need to get started, at some point, you may want to maintain, optimize, and expand your site.
WordPress makes that process easy by offering tips, tutorials, customer support, forums, and an intuitive platform interface.
Seek Out a Website Design Team That Knows WordPress
If your business is deciding on whether to invest in website design and development, check that WordPress is in your agency’s repertoire. It may be a big red flag, if they don’t.
Web designers who value WordPress also value these key marketing strategies:
- Design as a differentiator
- Options to help you scale or pivot when needed
- SEO
- Fast load times to keep users on your page
- Secure, ever-improving marketing tools
- Accessibility for all users
- Ease of use, even if you’re not technically inclined
WordPress is an essential resource that enables creativity and customizations that will attract users to your business. When 45.8% of the world’s websites rely on WordPress, something must be going very right.
Peter Mishler, senior digital copywriter at iFocus Marketing, is dedicated to using language to help clients find their audiences. He is the author of two books: a Kathryn A. Morton Prize-winning collection of poetry, from Sarabande Books (2018) and a book of reflections for public school teachers from Andrews McMeel Publishing (2021). His poetry has appeared in many national publications, including The Paris Review, and he is a contributing editor for Literary Hub. New to marketing, Peter taught English for 15 years.
